With its future in the balance, Novell’s latest results did little to boost the company. The company, which owns the SUSE Linux distribution, reported a $12 million drop in net income in the second quarter compared with the same period last year.

Southern African IT distributor, Workgroup, is anticipating growth in the South African Linux thin client market and says that Dell’s OptiPlex FX160 devices will be available locally pre-installed with Suse Linux Enterprise Thin Client. Sally Berimbau, Novell product manager at Workgroup, says the distributor is anticipating “that the Linux thin client market will grow to almost double the number of units currently deployed by 2011″.

More than 50% of IT executives in a recent survey said that they were planning to accelerate Linux adoption in 2009. “As organisations fight to cut costs and find value in this tough economic climate, Linux adoption will accelerate,” said Michelle Beetar, country manager for Novell South Africa.

Open source software heavyweight and Novell vice president Miguel de Icaza this week publicly slammed the Novell-Microsoft cross patent licensing deal. De Icaza, a co-founder of the open source Gnome desktop project, joined Novell in 2003 when the big-N bought his companyl, Ximian. “I’m not happy about the fact that such an agreement was made, [...]

Novell South Africa has finally filled the gaps in its senior management left by an exodus of staff in the second-half of last year. IT-Online reports that Michelle Beetar, formerly of Oracle and MWeb, has been named Novell SA country manager, replacing Stafford Masie who left to head up Google’s South Africa office in September. [...]

Via CRN we learn that according to Novell’s recent 10-K annual report, the Linux vendor received $355.6 million (R2.5 billion) from Microsoft in terms of the companies’ agreement on interoperability signed in 2006. No wonder Novell execs are feeling pleased with themselves.